hey i,
before i try to piece together a reply: i really appreciate your thoughts on this.
thanks!

i think your analogy comparing religion to drug-use is perhaps overly-simplified. to explain, i will attempt to expand that heroin metaphor. initially, heroin was developed in order to combat actual illnesses, to enable wartime amputations, other surgical necessities, chronic pain and the like. it wasn't initially an illicit "war on drugs" drug, if you know what i mean. in the current world of heroin, it seems there are three camps of people: 1) the drug-user (in various stages of addiction) and 2) the anti-drug person, who has never tried the drug, cannot conceive of any GOOD reason why someone would ever use heroin, believes all heroin users should be tossed in the clink, etc. and 3) the difficult to cubbyhole person who does their damndest to try and piece together the complicated threads to form some other kind of picture.

(bear with me, i, i know that i'm oversimplifying!)

so, okay. compare to religion. perhaps religion is more than just simply a framework of morality (or a set of random filters on morality, as you say) but supplies something beyond that. perhaps this "something beyond" is really difficult for the agnostic/atheist/otherly inclined to understand, because it seems like the ravings of madness, totally unnecessary, a luxury rather than a need. but perhaps this agnostic/atheistic pointofview towards religion ignores a crucial possibility: that religion functions to help people survive IN THE PLACE WHERE THEY ARE. and THIS PLACE is most emphatically NOT an agnostic/atheistical one.

i tend to think that people do what they do in order to get through life. whatever that happens to be (and sometimes unwisely). there are a lot of people out there dealing with some serious emotional/psychic trauma (whether other- or self-inflicted).

and i'm not talking about people who use religion as a tool to manipulate the gullible or those who desperately need to believe in something. i'm talking about those people who use religion to keep the pain away, just as a person would use painkillers to keep away the pain. sure people abuse painkillers, but does this make painkillers bad? i think the question becomes more complicated than a question of good/bad.

having been raised in a pretty religious environment, then sort of outgrowing it (the shoes didn't fit anymore), i'm aware that i might have some severe biases here. but, i guess my basic point is this: there are a lot of good (read: moral) people on both sides of the religion divide and i really feel that is deeply saddening that those people feel alienated from one another. i don't think that divide is unbridgeable. and i don't think that bridging that divide need necessarily compromise the moral underpinnings beneath either the religious or irreligious.

i hopt that i haven't buried myself in meaingless verbiage. but thanks!